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Smartphone Scanning

March 1, 2014

Is this awesome or what? You are looking at my iPhone with the Scanner Pro app by Readdle [iOS – $2.99] sitting on a Fopydo scanning stand [$30.00]. The stand is made of hard plastic and folds up into a lightweight “portfolio” you can easily take with you. The page you see in this example is resting against a tacky strip (enough to keep it there, but not enough to make it hard to remove) making it easy to insure the scanner app captures the entire page. The iPhone is sitting on a metal “shelf” and can slide left or right to adjust for whatever piece you are capturing. The shelf is substantial enough to support the phone, plus it gives me a “steady shot” of the item – something that can be difficult when I’m holding the phone over an object.

I’ve found the stand is great for those oversizes and/or odd shaped items and I’m loving the Scanner Pro app. This little jewel lets me capture and clean up just about anything, then quickly upload it to Evernote, Dropbox or Google Drive in a matter of seconds. It can save the scanned item as a JPG image or a PDF document. And it supports multi-page scans too. Using the stand, my phone with Scanner Pro and a Dropbox folder for saving, my workflow is actually faster than using the flatbed scanner and my desktop. The one down side is the resolution limits of my phone’s camera.

A news clipping scanned to PDF format. Click to view full size.

Is this going to replace my flatbed or document scanners? No! However, it will make capturing oversize items much easier and it gives me a mobile option to take when visiting relatives with interesting archives of their own.